Jan. 18: Subservicing, MLO, Ops, private client jobs; recruiting, fee collection, sales, borrower communication products

My high school basketball coach would tell us, “Real power lies in your ability to elevate others.” Managers, and recruiters, continue to be busy bringing on staff, not wanting to “make hay while the sun shines” and snag their piece this market. No one knows, with certainty, rates in the future, so grab talented staff now! While potential employees can post their resume for free here for employers to view, hiring managers have given me some of their tips. Have a plan, with best practices, and deliver a good experience to potential employees. What is the message that you are delivering? Use whatever data is available. How are you using it? For production hires, what is a branch or candidate’s volume, production mix, location, pricing of existing company, and profitability? What is your goal after you review the data? Any company’s top producer may not be right for your company. What kind of person is it? What do they care about? Top people want to be with professional companies. If there is not a fit, move on quickly. Learn about the person prior to speaking to them. “What do you like about your current company? What would you change?” “I will stay in touch.” If you say you’re going to follow up, make sure that you do. Make sure you know what your company’s brand is. How do interviewers make the candidate feel? How can your company help the candidate?

Employment & transitions

Bay Equity Home Loans offers geographic growth potential, dedicated resources, and a lucrative financial model. If you are considering a move now is the time to know what’s possible! Family-owned, with a great culture and $10B funded in 2020, Bay Equity has a firm commitment to the purchase and refi business, and most importantly, maintaining excellent turn times with exceptional operational support. Reach out to Sean Wilson for a confidential conversation about enhancing your future.

ServiceMac’s Retention Team is looking for loan officers, underwriters, processors, closers, and post-closers to join the fastest growing sub-servicer in the nation. ServiceMac offers competitive compensation, great benefits and an unapparelled culture. Our company is headquartered in Charlotte, NC but we are open to hiring remote team members. If you’re interested, please contact Jeramy Hall.

“Caliber Home Loans is excited that its proprietary loan origination system, H2O, is going digital! Our new version, H2O-Digital (H2O-D) is a user-centered, intuitive, and task-based interface. This improved technology reduces the time it takes to process and close loans. The H2O-D workflow provides role-specific responsibilities, parallel work, auto-assignment and much more. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to roll out more features of H2O-D in 2021. If you want to work for a company that’s investing in technology to improve work life for its team members, Caliber is for you! Visit our website today to view open opportunities. To be immediately considered for Operations or Sales positions, email Jonathan Stanley or Brian Miller respectively.”

“Shamrock Home Loans: As a loan officer or Branch Manager, you need to feel the difference and experience the results. We are expanding throughout the state of Florida, Virginia, Missouri, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York, seeking Area Managers, Producing Branch Managers and Loan Officers. If you want to have a leadership role and to build upon your existing production team, contact us by emailing [email protected] (413.297.6895). We have 31 years of stability and innovation that can help elevate your production and service levels. Take advantage of our Ad Agency quality Videography and marketing teams to grow. Agency direct, no overlays, strong sales culture, and an aggressive marketing driven by our leading-edge technology to make the loan process easy; check out our newest TV Ad designed specifically for Branch Managers and Loan Officers explaining our core purpose. Join a company where your voice is heard. Inquire today to learn more.”

The industry has felt the strain caused by the high volume of business. While other lenders attempted to recruit to fill the gap, Ty Kern’s Distributed Retail division of Sun West Mortgage Company shifted focus to grow from within by investing $7,000 to $10,000 per LO each month to grow their businesses. Kern, Executive Managing Director, calls this strategy the LO Reinvestment Act and says it’s designed to double the monthly production of every LO. “We owe it to the loyal, true believers to continuously improve Sun West,” Kern said. Sun West is not only heavily investing time, money, coaching, and other resources into its team, but also developing technology and enhancing its workflow to become the most efficient company in the business. Only once that goal is achieved will they invite additional like-minded individuals and teams to grow with them.

Agility 360, a mortgage-centric recruiting and project staffing firm, continues to fulfill the demand for experienced servicing and originations staff. With historically low rates, ongoing forbearance programs, and increasing delinquencies, mortgage servicers need a true partner that can quickly find and onboard qualified mortgage professionals. As a full-service, industry-focused personnel sourcing and recruiting firm, Agility 360 builds long-term client relationships by understanding each position and unique skill requirements. Our proprietary nationwide candidate database, disciplined sourcing, and vetting methodology ensures high client satisfaction. Whether you need call-center representatives, loan servicing specialists, or loan modification underwriters, Agility always finds “the best person for the job.” Leveraging over twenty years of talent management experience, Agility has created the most sophisticated mortgage talent resource network in the industry. If you’d like to learn how we can help, please contact Raj Sharma at 469-208-6337 or Cesar Hernandez.

Are you a Rockstar? PCMA re-imagined a compensation plan centered on the principles of lean manufacturing, enterprise loan origination and experiential design to remove the failure risk and refocused attention away from processing back to the client experience. PCMA Private Client Certified Mortgage Advisors are compensated on “New Loans Sent to Processing” giving them total control over their monthly income and speed of service. As a Certified Private Client Professional and Top Producer of PCMA you will benefit from a salary & bonus compensation range of $180,000 – $350,000 per year, a bonus paid at the time of loan submission: 25 bps (paid whether loan funds or not), Monday – Friday 8:30am – 5:30pm (no overtime/no weekends, work/life balance, Private Client invitation: Exclusive Direct Mail Marketing (No Internet Leads). For candidate consideration please send your resume to [email protected].

AnnieMac Home Mortgage welcomes Michael Royer, its new Chief Production Officer of Third-Party Originations, where he will be responsible with expanding and continued enhancement of AnnieMac’s modern TPO Loan Origination Platform. (If you’d like to learn more about AnnieMac Home Mortgage, please contact Paul Zinn, SVP of Business Development.)

Lender products & services

Are you ready for VA IRRRL and FHA Streamline refinance opportunities in this market? Learn how to efficiently submit your files once for a final approval! Join Freedom Mortgage Wholesale for live webinar training sessions on VA IRRRL or FHA Streamline mortgage products and origination processes. Ideal for new or experienced government originators. Sign up for a VA IRRRL or FHA Streamline webinar on 1/19 (FHA Streamline) or 1/22 (VA IRRRL).

Ready to build a real estate investor channel of business in 2021? Then don’t miss tomorrow’s Industry Insights (virtual!) event, “Make 2021 Your Wealthiest Year in Real Estate” powered by Civic Financial Services, one of the nation’s largest institutional private lenders. Join Bill Tessar, President and CEO of CIVIC, as he leads a dynamic conversation with real estate maverick Greg Geiser, Founder and CEO of Wedgewood. With more than 50,000 fix and flips under his belt from coast to coast, Greg has overcome every test, trial, and obstacle the real estate and lending space could throw at him in the past 30+ years. You don’t want to miss the strategies, advice and lessons learned from Bill and Greg, including leveraging hot markets, assessing property potential, and navigating the challenges in today’s real estate investment market. Happening tomorrow, January 19^th at 9AM PST: register here.

How are you collecting your upfront fees? Well, if you’re like most lenders, your loan officer gets their borrower’s credit card details on a form and someone in operations runs the card through a virtual terminal. This is not good. What if you could automate that entire process? Loan officer clicks a button in the LOS, borrower gets a text message with a link to pay their fees, they complete the payment on their device and the receipt is automatically sent to the eFolder. Fee Chaser by LenderLogix puts your upfront fee collection on autopilot. Appraisal fees, credit report fees, condo documents, Fee Chaser handles it all. Check it out now and you’ll be up and running in a couple of weeks!

Improving LO communication

If the MBA forecasts are right, refinance volume will drop significantly in Q3 and Q4. “With capacity issues resolved and plenty of profits from 2020 in the war chest, price wars are very likely to ensue in the second half of the year,” says MortgageSAT Director Mike Seminari. “In that environment, originators with a reputation for delighting their customers will emerge as winners.” According to Seminari, almost all opportunities for creating delight are rooted in communication, when borrowers are called prior to closing to go over final figures, those loans rate 92 points higher on the NPS scale than those that do not. In his January MortgageSAT Tip, Seminari offers three ideas originators can implement now to ensure that their pipelines remain full through all of 2021.

Capital markets

Looking at what we learned last week, December’s, and early January’s, economic data continue to point towards slower growth relative to the exceptional pave observed in the third quarter of 2020. Retail sales have trended lower for three consecutive months, falling in December, but 2.9 percent above their level 12 months ago. Initial jobless claims spiked by 181,000 to reach 965,000 for the week ending January 9. This marks a departure from their recent range near 800,000 and significantly higher than their pre-recession levels. Inflation remains tame with consumer prices up only 1.4 percent for the year and producer prices up a mere 0.85 percent. Both measures remain below the Fed’s long-term target of 2 percent. Most of the recent pressure on inflation has come from a rebound in energy prices. Mortgage applications remain strong and were up 8.0 percent for the week of January 8 as rates ticked up. Despite another $1.9 trillion in potential stimulus, mortgage rates remain relatively low as the markets await the inauguration of President-elect Biden as well as progress on the vaccination rollout.

Despite higher-than-expected holiday spending, U.S. retail sales in December posted a surprise miss. That was the big talking point to close the week last week, which dovetailed with poor sentiment from reports that countries in Europe and Asia tightening their lockdown restrictions to contain the spread of the coronavirus, and caution surrounding President-elect Biden getting his $1.9 trillion economic stimulus proposal passed. Treasuries rallied to close the week and the UMBS30 basis closed mostly tighter.

Today the markets are closed in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. You should know that any lender open and sending out rates and taking rate locks on a day when the bond markets are closed a) has no way to truly accurately price loans, has no way to hedge their pipeline without the ability to trade liquid instruments. For rate sheets, most estimate where prices should be, given foreign bond market activity (which is usually muted unless something catastrophic happens). So on Friday most estimate today’s locks and do the hedging on Friday.

There were four churches and a synagogue in a small town: a Presbyterian church, a Baptist church, a Methodist church, a Catholic church, and a Jewish synagogue. Each church and the synagogue had a problem with squirrels.

The Presbyterian church called a meeting to decide what to do about their squirrels. After much prayer and consideration they determined the squirrels were predestined to be there and they shouldn’t interfere with God’s divine will.

At the Baptist church, the squirrels had taken an interest in the baptistery. The deacons met and decided to put a water slide on the baptistery and let the squirrels drown themselves. The squirrels liked the slide and, unfortunately, knew instinctively how to swim so twice as many squirrels showed up the following week.

The Methodist church decided that they were not in a position to harm any of God’s creatures. So, they humanely trapped their squirrels and set them free near the Baptist Church. Two weeks later the squirrels were back when the Baptists took down the water slide.

But the Catholic Church came up with a very creative strategy. They baptized all the squirrels and consecrated them as members of the church. Now they only see them on Christmas and Easter.

Not much was heard from the Jewish synagogue, but it’s rumored that they took one squirrel and circumcised him. They haven’t seen any squirrels on their property since.

Visit www.robchrisman.com for more information on our industry partners, access archived commentaries, or to subscribe to the Daily Mortgage News and Commentary. If you’re interested, visit my periodic blog at the STRATMOR Group web site. The current blog is, “Work Longer and Harder, or Work Smarter”.

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(Market data provided in partnership with MBS Live. For free job postings and to view candidate resumes visit LenderNews. This newsletter is designed for sophisticated mortgage professionals only. There are no paid endorsements by me. For up-to-date mortgage news visit Mortgage News Daily. For archived commentaries, or to subscribe, go to www.robchrisman.com. Copyright 2021 Chrisman LLC. All rights reserved. Occasional paid job & product listings do appear. This report or any portion hereof may not be reprinted, sold, or redistributed without the written consent of Rob Chrisman.)